Eyes and Me

I grew up with my parents needing contacts. And I was warned that I'd inherited not-so-hot eye genes. So when I was fourteen, in high school, sitting in my math class and having trouble making out the equations on the board, I knew what was going on. I told my parents, and before long I found myself in an eye-doctors office.

I had braces as the time, so glasses were absolutely out of the question. My eye doctor wanted me to have soft contacts, my dad insisted I get hard ones. Hard contacts hold one's eye in its proper shape much better than soft ones do - this is why he wanted me to have them, they would help my eye not degenerate as fast as otherwise. I think my eye doctor's reasoning was that as a teenager, I wouldn't take care of hard contacts and that they're more difficult to adapt to than soft.

My dad won.

I'm glad he did - my eyes haven't deteriorated as fast as they would otherwise. I've actually only been to the eye doctor ... four more times since then. I'm sure an optometrist would wince at that, but I'm cool. I just went yesterday, for the first time in two and a half years. Ideally, hard contacts should be changed once a year, but she said I'm pretty much good, and my eyesight is almost the same anyway. I take good care of them. Take that, high school eye doctor.

Before I left for college, I decided I might need some glasses to take with me, in case my contacts were lost (knock on wood, I've never lost them) or if I needed to give my eyes a rest from the contacts (I generally wear them 16 hours a day and don't have an issue). But it's still nice to have them. When I went to pick out a frame, I believe I brought my friends Jaimi and Alex, and told them that whoever picked out the frame that I liked best, I would buy an ice cream for them. I think I found the frame myself, and bought us all ice creams anyway.

I'm sorry, future children. I do not have the greatest eye genes to give you. But perhaps you'll inherit them from your father.